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Many of our favorite everyday foods have extremely strange origins.

Have you ever stopped to think why we eat the things we eat? Some of it seems natural, of course, like an apple growing from a tree. At some point in history, someone picked one, took a bite, and realized it was delicious.

Hunting and eating animals is similar. It's part of our DNA, even if you choose not to partake, and you can easily trace the path from early hunter-gatherers to packaged chicken nuggets.

But at some point, humans started getting really creative. We picked coffee cherries, removed the seeds, and brewed them into a dark and bitter drink–why?! We smushed up grapes and let them sit around for a while and then drank their juices. We decided to try consuming cow's milk that had gone really, really sour.

Whose ideas was it to try these things? Fascinatingly, many of our favorite foods, even the things we eat everyday, were the result of necessity or pure accidents. Here are some of the weirdest yet most interesting food origin stories.

1. Cheese & Yogurt


 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining Cheese is essentially just spoiled milk!  Photo by David Foodphototasty on Unsplash  

We know that cheese and yogurt both come from milk, often cow's milk. We also know that milk goes bad extremely quickly and disgustingly. So how did we bridge that gap and come to discover these two amazing foods?

According to the National Historic Cheesemaking Center Museum (in Wisconsin; where else?) cheesemaking dates back thousands of years to Greek mythology and the ancient Egyptians. It's said that milk was often stored in containers made from the stomachs of animals. The only downside of stomach containers is that they contained an enzyme called rennet that triggers coagulation in the milk, allowing it to separate into curds and whey.

Those Greeks and Egyptians must have been mighty surprised when the curds, in particular, turned out to be absolutely delicious. The BBC writes, however, that this accidental process was probably first discovered in the Middle East and Central Asia.

2. Wine

 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining It must have been fun to discover old grapes turned into wine.  Photo by Lefteris kallergis on Unsplash  

Today, the winemaking process is pretty complex, so much so that some people consider it an art. Or, at the very least, a craft of the highest order.

I've always been curious how we ever came up with the idea that we could get drunk off of grapes, long before the days of perfectly pruned vines and aged-oak barrels. Turns out, the story is not that dissimilar to the origins of cheesemaking, except it goes back even further. Humanity's natural desire for a good party is apparently one of our most ancient traditions!

Early humans would forage large quantities of fruit like grapes and berries. The ones at the bottom, naturally, would get smushed and likely not be eaten for a while. They would have time to ferment, creating an alcohol-like substance, that must have been pretty pleasurable for anyone willing to go digging around at the bottom of the fruit pile.

Beer has a similar origin story, only instead of fruit, it was grains for bread that were left out too long and began to ferment.

3. Coffee

 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining Coffee fruit was making the goats a little too happy.  Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash  

Coffee is definitely one of the weirder things that we consume. The coffee beans we're used to seeing do not appear exposed in the wild—they're actually tucked away inside something called a coffee cherry. Each cherry contains two seeds, or coffee beans.

The story goes that an Ethiopian goat herder in the year 850 (give or take) noticed that whenever his goats ate the cherries, they would become energetic, playful, and just plain happier. Kaldi, the herder, is credited with being one of the first to forage the cherries. At first, the leaves were used to make tea, and then the berries were eaten directly to get the happy-energy effects. It wasn't until a few centuries later that the beans were made into a beverage for the first time.

4. Tikka Masala

I absolutely love getting Indian food whenever possible and, like a lot of Americans, I adore Chicken Tikka Masala. But I never knew that it was created out of necessity as recently as the 1970s.

The widely accepted legend has it that a Glasgow chef named Ali Ahmed Aslam served a customer some chicken tikka one night and found the patron to be very hard to please. The man insisted that the chicken was too dry. So Aslam scoured the kitchen and whipped up a special sauce made of yogurt and tomato, which helped keep the chicken moist.

Pretty quickly, chicken tikka masala became famous across the globe. The Bristorian writes, "it is widely represented as the quintessential Indian dish despite its origin in the United Kingdom."

5. Tomatoes

 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining Tomatoes were thought to be poisonous until very recently.  Photo by Huzeyfe Turan on Unsplash  

It doesn't seem surprising at first that most cultures around the world regularly eat tomatoes, with a few exceptions. They grow in the ground and look beautiful. It's not shocking that someone bit into one at some point in history and decided we should all get to enjoy them.

But what is surprising is that, in the Western world at least, tomatoes didn't catch on for a long time. Even in Italy, which is practically synonymous with the tomato, Italians didn't really eat them widely until the 19th century. That's because tomatoes were long thought to be poisonous, a member of the nightshade family which contains many toxic plants.

One story claims that a man named Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson ate tomato after tomato in front of a crowd in New Jersey to prove to the world they were safe. It's probably not a true story, but it's fun to imagine.

6. Tea

 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining Tea is one of civilization's most ancient drinks.  Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash  

Tea, like coffee, seems odd when you really think about it. Boiling dried up leaves and herbs in water? Whose bright idea was that?

It turns out, it was an Emperor's idea! Tea is truly one of the most ancient beverages, and legend has it that Chinese emperor Shen Nung accidentally discovered the delectable drink in 2737 BC. He was supposedly sitting under a tree while his servant boiled him some drinking water, a common practice at the time. Some leaves are said to have fallen in from the Camellia sinensis tree, which gave the brew a pleasant aroma.

Shen Nung tasted it and was impressed, while also finding that it made him feel great. Tea was initially considered medicinal and didn't become a daily drink until much later.

7. French fries

 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining Fried potatoes began as a replacement for fried fish.  Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash  

Despite the name, French fries are said to have initially been discovered in Belgium.

In the 1600s, villagers near one of the country's rivers would catch fish to try. Fried fish was an incredibly popular treat, but in the winter months, the river would freeze and catching fish would become impossible.

Out of necessity, they tried cutting up potatoes into a similar shape and frying those, instead. The result was delicious! When American soldiers came through the area during World War I, word spread quickly for obvious reasons.

8. Potato chips

The accidental invention of potato chips is a direct offshoot of French fries, so it deserves a spot on this list.

Some 250 years after the invention of fries, the story goes that a chef named George Crum had another difficult customer on his hands. (Seeing a pattern here?) The man was unhappy that his French fries were too soggy and thick.

Smithsonian Magazine writes, "Furious with such a fussy eater, Crum sliced some potatoes as slenderly as he could, fried them to a crisp and sent them out to Vanderbilt as a prank. Rather than take the gesture as an insult, Vanderbilt was overjoyed."

They were called Saratoga Chips at first, a reference to their birthplace of Saratoga, New York. Experts say the potato chip may have officially been invented before this famous showdown, but George Crum undoubtedly helped popularize the snack.

9. Popsicles

 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining An 11-year-old accidentally invented popsicles.  Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash  

The official Popsicle brand itself says the frozen treat was invented by an 11-year-old boy in 1905.

Frank Epperson allegedly left a cup of soda, complete with a stick for stirring, outside on a cold night and was chagrinned to later find it frozen. However, one lick and he was convinced—frozen meant delicious! Young Frank named the treat after himself: "The Episcle."

An entrepreneurial little bugger, Epperson perfected the popsicle and began selling them around local beaches before patenting the pops in 1924.

10. Cheetos/cheese puffs/cheese curls

 food, food history, origins of food, history, funny, fun facts, eating, culture, nutrition, taste, dining Cheetos and cheese puffs have a fascinating accidental origin.  Photo by Ryan Quintal on Unsplash  

I've always been curious about cheese curls, which are one of my all-time favorite snacks. What even is a cheese puff? The potato chip, though unique, makes sense: It's a deep fried, thin slice of potato. Cheetos and cheese curls are just so far from anything found in nature it boggles the mind how they might have been invented.

Well, boggle no more! In 1935, cheese puffs were accidentally invented in a factory that made animal feed. Corn was ground in a grinder to make the feed, but when it came time to clean the machine, the workers fed moist corn through. The resulting waste product was airy, puffy blobs of corn that would fall to the ground.

A worker named Edward Wilson decided to try some and found them utterly delicious, and thus named them Korn Kurls.

11. Worcestershire sauce

I love a good happy accident almost as much as I love Worcestershire sauce on my burgers and steaks. Luckily, this story has both.

In 1835, drug store owners John Lea and William Perrins were asked to recreate a sauce a local baron had tried during a visit to India. Their creation was an utter failure, smelling horribly and tasting worse. So they hid the batch they created in the basement and forgot about it for nearly two years.

According to Great British Chefs, "When they rediscovered it, it had aged well, turning into the fermented, umami-packed sauce we use today."

Pop Culture

These fun facts about how 5 well-known things got their names are blowing people's minds

Did you know that the name "Idaho" was made up by a con artist who tried to pass it off as a Native American word?

From how Idaho got its name to why we capitalize "B" in "dB," here are some fascinating factoids.

The "I was today years old when I learned" meme might be a bit overdone at this point, but thanks to the random factoids people share on the internet, it's a near-daily reality. Rarely do we go an entire day without seeing some surprising, delightful or head-scratching piece of info cross our feeds.

Let's take the etymology of words, for example. Did you know that the word "jumbo" originated from an exceptionally large elephant named "Jumbo," and not the other way around? Or that the word "muscle" comes from the Latin musculus, meaning "little mouse," because the Romans thought that muscles moving looked like mice running under the skin?

It's fun to see where things come from, but sometimes we can be surprised by an origin that we thought for sure couldn't be right, but actually is. For instance:


Michelin star ratings for fancy restaurants come from the Michelin tire company.

Yes, really. The assumption many of us have been operating under is that Michelin the restaurant review guide must have been founded by some hoity toity French restaurant critic and not the tire company with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man mascot. Yet here we are, being all wrong.

They don't even try to hide it, so it's surprising that many of us don't know this. The logo and the Michelin man are right there at the top of the Michelin guide website, and the story of how the guide came about is shared on the About Us page:

"It all started in Clermont-Ferrand in central France in 1889, when brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin founded their eponymous tire company, fuelled by a grand vision for the French automobile industry at a time when there were fewer than 3,000 cars in the country. In order to help motorists develop their trips - thereby boosting car sales and in turn, tyre purchases - the Michelin brothers produced a small guide filled with handy information for travellers, such as maps, information on how to change a tyre, where to fill up on petrol, and wonderfully - for the traveller in search of respite from the adventures of the day - a listing of places to eat or take shelter for the night."

The Michelins gave away the guide for free until one of them saw a tire shop using them to prop up a workbench. They decided to demonstrate the value of the guide by charging money for it. They also started sending mystery diners to review restaurants anonymously, and over the next hundred years they'd hone the star rating system that restaurants now aspire to impress with.

The "Guinness" of The Guinness Book of World Records is actually the same Guinness as the beer company.

Similar story here—who knew this was the same Guinness? Only this time, the offshoot was founded not by Guinness himself but by British engineer and industrialist Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery. He conceived of the idea in the early 1950s to satisfy bar patrons who asked trivia questions.

The impetus was Beaver himself getting into an argument over what was the fastest game bird in Europe during a shooting match. But he couldn't find the answer in any reference books. So he decided to create a book with the help of a couple of sports journalists, and the Guinness Book of World Records was born.

The first book was 190 pages and had 4,000 entries. As of 2022, more than 60,000 Guinness world records had been catalogued in the world records database.

The reason the "B" in dB, the abbreviation for "decibel," is capitalized is because it's named after Alexander Graham Bell.

This is one that came out of left field for a lot of folks. How many years did we spend in school without learning this simple fact?


Remember Hansen's Natural soda? It morphed into Monster.

If you were a child of the 80s or 90s, and especially if you had parents who were anti-Big Soda or anti-high fructose corn syrup, you probably drank your fair share of Hansen's Natural soda.

If you weren't paying close attention, you may not know that in 2012, Hansen's Natural Corporation officially changed its name…to Monster Beverage Corporation. That's right, as in Monster energy drinks. Apparently, they found that energy drinks had become their bread and butter, so they leaned into it full force.

Talk about a wild pendulum swing of a rebrand.

"Idaho" was made up by as sketchy congressional delegate who tried to pass it off as a Native American word

There are some unclear spots in the story, but the gist is that back in 1860, the Western territory of that would become Colorado was soon to become a state and needed a name. Congress wanted the state to have a Native American name and someone suggested Idaho, a name allegedly coined by congressional delegate George M. Willing, who claimed it was a Native American word from the Shoshone that meant "Gem of the Mountains." It wasn't and it didn't. He totally made it up.

Congress approved "Idaho" as the name for Colorado at first, but then took it back after they found out it wasn't actually a Native American name. (Did they then choose a Native American name? No, they went with the Spanish name of Colorado.)

In the meantime, someone had named a steamboat in the Pacific Northwest "Idaho," and then some mines got named after the steamboat, and after a few years and several "named after" iterations, people forgot that Idaho was a fake, made-up word, and Congress gave the state its name.

And now, Idaho is not only a state but the last name of a fan-favorite character in one of the best loved sci-fi stories of all time that takes place 10,000 years into the future. A conman's word forever immortalized. God bless America.

Education

5 fun facts about St. Patrick's Day to wow your friends and family

Saint Patrick wasn't Irish and neither is corned beef.

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Several St. Patrick's Day traditions didn't originally come from Ireland.

Shamrocks, leprechauns, corned beef and cabbage, pinches for those who forget to wear green—St. Patrick's Day is filled with traditions that have passed down from generation to generation. What began as a religious holiday in Ireland over 1,000 years ago to honor Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, has morphed into a raucous celebration of all things Irish here across the pond.

Ironically, however, some of those traditions and "all things Irish" didn't actually come from Ireland—including Saint Patrick himself.

If you want to impress your friends with some interesting St. Patrick's day trivia, here's a handful of fun facts to put in your pocket.


1. Saint Patrick wasn't actually Irish. He was British.

Born in Britain in 386 A.D., St. Patrick was captured by pirates and brought to Ireland at age 16, where he was sold as a slave. For six years, he worked in the fields, tending sheep and praying. One night, he dreamt that God was directing him to a boat that would take him home, and in 408 A.D., he escaped Ireland. Then, after being ordained as a bishop in 432 A.D., the Pope sent him back to the Emerald Isle to spread Christianity.

"Patrick became inflamed with the desire to help alleviate the suffering of the Irish people who were burdened under the yoke of slavery, brutal tribal warfare and pagan idolatry," Matthew Paul Grote, a Catholic priest with the Order of Preachers, shared with USA Today. Saint Patrick incorporated pagan rituals into Christian worship practices to ease the resistance to Christianity. Even when he was attacked and captured by Irish clans, he would respond with non-violence and share his Catholic faith peacefully, always treating non-Christians with fairness.

He is credited with the spread of Christianity in Ireland, but he himself wasn't Irish.

2. The legend about St. Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland? Literally impossible.

Legend has it that St. Patrick was fasting for 40 days on a hilltop when he was attacked by snakes. With a sermon and a wave of his staff, he drove all the snakes in Ireland out to the sea where they all drowned, which is why, according to the lore, there are no snakes in Ireland.

Except there were never any snakes in Ireland, according to the fossil record. The cool climate and being part of an island make Ireland uninhabitable for snakes. Scholars today generally view the snake story as a metaphor for driving paganism out of Ireland.

3. St. Patrick's Day was not traditionally a festive holiday.

Parades filled with floats, pubs filled with festivity, parties filled with frivolity—all of that fun, celebratory St. Patrick's day revelry is fairly new. For the vast majority of the holiday's history in Ireland, it was a somber, quiet religious holy day spent in prayer. It wasn't until Irish immigrants to America began celebrating their Irish pride in the 1700s with parades and such that the holiday became more of a festive occasion.

According to History.com, the invention of the television let Irish people see how the U.S. celebrated the holiday, which led to the party atmosphere making its way to Ireland.

4. The traditional color associated with St. Patrick was blue, not green.

St. Patrick's Day is all about green green green, from the shamrock shakes to the leprechaun coats to the Irish flag. But the color Saint Patrick himself was actually associated with is blue. The earliest depictions of the patron saint of Ireland show him in blue garments, and according to The Smithsonian, when George III created the Order of St. Patrick, a new order of chivalry for the Kingdom of Ireland, its official color was known as "St. Patrick's Blue."

Green is more of a political color than a religious one, as it became the color of Irish nationalism in 1789 with a series of rebellions against the UK. And really, green makes the most sense as a symbol for a place known as The Emerald Isle. The shamrock helps, too. (Another fun fact: The green, white and orange flag of Ireland was officially adopted in 1937 and points directly to the contemporary history between the Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity in the country.)

5. The tradition of eating corned beef didn't come from Ireland, either.

For many Americans, a St. Patrick's Day meal simply must include corned beef and cabbage. Traditional Irish fare, right? Nope.

Though the Irish produced some of the world's most sought-after corned beef in the mid-1600s, they didn't eat it themselves. Due to England's oppressive laws, Irish people couldn't afford beef, and when they could afford meat, they ate salted pork or bacon. (The reason they produced corned beef was due to some complicated history with the UK and cattle shipping restrictions.)

Two centuries later, Irish immigrants who had a bit more money started buying kosher beef from their Jewish immigrant neighbors in America. According to The Smithsonian, what we consider Irish corned beef today was really Jewish corned beef tossed into a stew with some cabbage and potatoes—truly an example of the American immigration "melting pot."

In Ireland today, you'd most likely be served lamb or beef stew for a St. Patrick's Day feast. (However, much like our St. Paddy's Day revelry, the American tradition of corned beef has slowly made its way into Ireland's celebrations as well.)

It's a wee bit funny to dive into the history of St. Patrick's Day and find that many of the things we typically think of as old Irish traditions are neither particularly old (compared to Saint Patrick himself) nor purely Irish. That's not to say these traditions are not worth celebrating; Irish Americans have their own storied history in the U.S., after all, and who doesn't love a dyed green river or a green-themed parade with lucky shamrocks and leprechauns?

No matter how you celebrate, have a very Happy St. Patrick's Day! Or as they say in Irish Gaelic, "Beannachtaí na Féile Padraig ort!" (Watch how to pronounce it below.)

A doornail really is deader than a regular nail.

"Old Marley was as dead as a doornail."

Charles Dickens' line from "A Christmas Carol" is probably the most famous example of the phrase "dead as a doornail," but it's certainly not the only one. Shakespeare used it in Henry IV Part 2: "Look on me well: I have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more." An unnamed poet used the idiom for the first time in print in a poem published in 1350, but it's still not uncommon to hear it used today.

"Dead as a doornail" obviously means dead, deceased, definitively not alive. But why a doornail and not just a nail? All nails are dead by their nature of being metal, right? So why even use a nail at all? Why not "dead as a door" or "dead as a rock"? Those are dead, too. What makes a doornail specifically deader than other dead things?

There's a surprisingly interesting answer to that question. As it turns out there really is a good reason for specifying a doornail to convey being really, truly dead.

YouTube creator Malcolm P.L., who mostly makes videos about the history of armor, shared an explanation as well as a demonstration of what a doornail actually is:


So it turns out that a doornail isn't just a nail in a door, but a nail that cannot be removed and reused. Way back when, nails were made by hand and quite valuable. People would salvage and repurpose nails whenever they could. The way doornails were bent and driven into the backside of a door made it virtually impossible for them to be reused as a nail.

So not only are doornails dead simply because they're nails, but because their future potential for any other use is also dead. They are doubly dead, if you will. Extra deceased.

How many other idioms do we commonly use without knowing their full origins? Let the cat out of the bag? The whole nine yards? Spill the beans? Get someone's goat?

Language is so fascinating. Time to do some Googling.